Cold Freeze
by Maiga Ryu
Summary: <html><head></head>The most dangerous enemy is not the one we choose, but the one we make ourselves.  Las Noches has become cold, and in her cell Kuchiki Rukia waits.</html>


Title: Cold Freeze  
>Chapter: Prologue (Silence Standard)<br>Rating: PG-13  
>Summary: The most dangerous enemy is not the one we choose, but the one we make ourselves.<br>Warnings: (Eventual) Blood, gore, violence, swearing, currently psychological abuse and/or torture.  
>Spoilers: Unless you're waaaay back before Rukia's execution, none.<p>

Notes: So I seem to be incapable of writing a non-traumatized Rukia. Thanks, muse. Goes sharply AU after Rukia's fight with the Ninth Espada. Expect updates to be very slow, I'm not quite sure where this is going yet.

****(_**Cold Freeze**_)****  
><strong>Prologue: Silence Standard<strong>

Las Noches has become cold.

The chill permeates everything, slipping through walls and floors and spirit barriers like they do not exist. It cuts into flesh, lingers deep in the bones, and even the Espada are not fully immune - only a discomfort, perhaps, but an achievement just the same. While no one can explain it, they do know who is to blame.

In her cell, Kuchiki Rukia waits.

* * *

><p>She kneels in the center, hands and arms bound straight behind her, the room shielded from detection and escape and everything in between. It is designed to keep her power contained, for all the good that seems to do. The room is small, windowless, and empty.<p>

Or it would be empty. Frosts coat the white walls in swirls of iridescence, and ice hides in the corners, hangs from the ceiling in random clusters of tiny spears.

She is a black island in a sea of white and the ghosts of refracted color, untouched by her environment, eyes closed and head bowed in a false pretense of supplication.

Her muscles should be atrophying from the forced inactivity; her reiatsu should be weakening from lack of food and water.

They don't.

If anything they only get stronger. They took her sword away when they captured her, but not her zanpakuto. She remembers - zanpakuto reside within the heart and it would take something far more invasive to separate them then simply removing the container. Shinigami like to forget this. So long as she remembers, she cannot be disarmed.

(She does not know that once the remains of her blade have lost all trace of power and reiatsu, Aizen has them sent back to Seireitei wrapped in silk like a thoughtful gift. In response is the only joint effort Ichigo and Byakuya have ever made. Las Noches never does manage to confirm the extent of the damage.)

Her friends are not coming - no one is coming for her and she knows this. The thought does not concern her much, if at all. No matter what little games her captors would try to play, she knows her friends must think her dead or they wouldn't have left in the first place. She had thought herself dead, before waking in her prison. Instead she finds an odd sort of comfort, in that they had escaped to safety and she had not been a burden. So long as they continue to be safe by not being here she will not worry herself over it.

Her aura is fueled by an icy fury for her imprisonment and jailers both and she radiates it, vibrates with it in a relentless cold that cannot be blocked by walls or barriers. She meets all interaction with disdainful Kuchiki silence, underscored with a venomous stare. Her stubborn refusal to react does not bother anyone, except to disappoint Ichimaru. He tries every line of questioning, taunts every crack of insecurity and weakness she has ever known, both displayed and hidden. It gains him nothing; when she had finally laid Kaien-dono's memory to rest, a part of her had indeed died in that place.

She has cast off her fears.

* * *

><p>Aizen decides that, once she has been sufficiently broken, Kuchiki Rukia will make a useful Espada. On her own merits the girl has never been terribly special in the traditional sense; her strength is average, if highly overqualified for her current position, and so had never caught his attention before. The hougyoku would be able to take care of that - it has been drenched in her reiatsu, tucked inside her soul for so long that it resounds with her pattern. The time spent with it, unwitting or not, have created certain qualifications for compatibility that will be easy (and productive) to exploit. No, he has no doubts that when used on Kuchiki Rukia it will be the best reaction to date.<p>

But there is more to power than just what you can do for yourself.

When one looks closer, it becomes clear that the Kuchiki princess has surrounded herself with powerful, volatile people. They come to her as moths to a flame, drawn into her orbit where they stay - and then, sometimes against all logic, they _grow_. Now, she is the other half of the equation with Kurosaki Ichigo, dual stars orbiting each other that can be found at the center of one of the most important webs in Seireitei. If used to draw the Kurosaki boy in, that whole thing will collapse with its lynch pin snapped.

And more than that is the downright curious turn her reiatsu has taken. Strangely, the fight with his Ninth Espada seems to have been only good for her. Kuchiki's spiritual pressure has not wavered, despite everything. It remains at a steady level of iron control no matter what is happening around - or to - her. Interrogation and kidou have not forced her to drop it, despite the best efforts of those involved. They stop feeding her and even _that_ does not do much. It takes him a little bit to work out why, but it is only more intriguing; by condensing every particle of moisture in the air she is able to take in enough water to survive. Taking that skill one step further, she is also slowly, stubbornly breaking down the dense reishi prevalent in Hueco Mundo, and thus is able to keep her reiatsu steady.

And now it is _lethal_. Two pairs of guards are already dead from exposure, and all attempts to break her quickly have met a frigid wall of resistance that would put her noble brother to shame.

So. They will just have to break her the long way.

* * *

><p>She does not know how long she has been here anymore, and truthfully, does not really care. They have tried torture, but it is ineffective. (She freezes the nerves and ices the wounds once it stops.) They have tried fear, but she gives them nothing to work with. (Ichimaru assaults her with everything from harsh lies to the cruelest truths but she disbelieves everything he says on principle alone.) They have even tried illusions. (She closes her eyes and retreats to her soulgrounds, while that manipulative bastard plays to an audience that is not watching.)<p>

They try everything to ward off her cold, and it wickedly amuses her and her sword both that they seem so ineffective at it. Several shielding techniques and spiritual bindings reduce how far it reaches, but nothing can be done about the intensity. They can't even get it contained to the compound, let alone the room. She has heard the guards panicking when the shift change comes to find their comrades dead from the exposure, to stupid to leave when it becomes too much, and it brings her no small amount of malicious satisfaction. (This bloodthirsty inclination worries her a little, but Sode no Shirayuki remains unconcerned and she can't see any real reason to grow a conscience over it.)

Knocking her out does little more than take the edge off it, but when the flunky the send in to put her out again suffocates from frozen lungs while trying to cross the room, they give that up easy enough. Besides, letting her sleep away her captivity won't help them any in breaking her.

Then, for the first and only time, Aizen comes to see her.

* * *

><p>"We meet again, Kuchiki-san," he smiles, and it is gentle as it ever had been when he was running the Fifth. She knows this can mean nothing good and resigns herself to hearing what he has to say.<p>

That doesn't mean she is going to answer him, however.

He continues as it becomes clear she will not grace even him with a reaction. It doesn't seem to bother him much.

"It occurs to me," he muses, voice low and pleasant, "that you could be terribly useful, Kuchiki-san." He paces a slow circle around her kneeling form, as if in some sort of test. She doesn't try to track him, or show any discomfort when he passes out of her sight. She does not look to him until he is standing directly in front of her again, back where he started. It only amuses him more.

"All things break," his tone is conversational, genteel, and so very, very dangerous. "It is in the nature of all things that exist, I'm afraid. One of the reasons this world is so imperfect. Anything that has form also has a limit. If you push beyond that limit, it will break. Simple cause and effect; action and consequence.

"And we all have our limits, Kuchiki-san. You, and even me, for the moment. The trick is knowing _how_ they break. Sometimes, if you're careful, you can make them stronger after they're broken."

The mingled promise and threat is clear as a naked blade in his hand. The reckless, street slum child in her wants to rail at his presumption; the haughty, pride-driven part wants to make a cutting remark at his arrogant assurance; but Sode no Shirayuki silences both with the barest touch of her presence, the zanpakuto's own icy rage contagious.

_All that he wants, we shall refuse to give. All that he seeks to take we will see tainted._

The momentary urge to respond fades, drowned out by their combined resolution, and she instead contents herself with calmly, privately imagining all the ways she could kill him. (Each idea is more viciously creative than the last.)

Aizen is content with her silence. "You will be," he smiles, "very useful to me, Kuchiki-san. Once you have broken, I will be able to use the Hougyouku to remake you into a blade that will be befitting of your zanpakuto. If the Kurosaki boy has not already fallen, we will have him then. I daresay even Kuchiki Byakuya would pause. And any hesitation will be all that you would require. I'll make certain of at least that much before we are done."

He uses _we_, as if she is already one of his. This time Rukia's own resolution curbs any urge to react. There is no fear, nor horror in her - both of those things, and a few others besides, have already been slain and laid to rest with the ghosts of her regret. Instead there is a new thing stirring in her chest, the first tiny threads of something darker and even more potent than the blinding rage that uselessly squirms under her control for influence over her reiatsu.

_All emotions are a blade as real and dangerous as the sword in your hands_, Sode no Shirayuki whispers. _Learn to wield them effectively as you would any other weapon._

Love, anger, determination, the desire to protect. Hiding it will only distract them. Letting it use you is worse. No, she will accept this new weapon he has unwittingly given them, the first seeds of true hate taking root. Hate for his arrogance, his thought to turn her against her pride, his unmitigated _gall_ that he would seek to use Rukia to strike at all the things she protects, holds sacred. She will hone it, whatever it's eventual strength. The cutting edge of hate is sharp, if often double-sided. Once she learns to control it, it should serve them well.

"However, you're not much use to me now," Aizen continues, blithely unaware of the thing he has just set in motion in the very depths of her. "So for the time being, I will forget about you." His smile is calm and lovely and shows not a hint of the insanity that lays in wait behind it. "The rest of the world already has, so they'll hardly miss you. The reishi trick is cute and clever, but hardly a permanent solution. You'll still starve eventually. It will just take months or years instead of weeks.

"I'm sure sensory deprivation will set in long before then."

And with a last condescending smile for that ominous sentence, Aizen turns around and leaves. Ichimaru is waiting for him just outside the entrance, and as he catches sight of her, graces Rukia with a mocking smirk and a two fingered salute before the door swings shut and she is alone with her weapons and her new resolution.

* * *

><p>Every moment is spent in her soul. They talk, fight, meditate, train. They share together in ways that neither had thought to try before. They promise <em>nothing can break us just let them try<em> and _you are not alone I am here_.

They cannot break her. She will wait out these days because she knows, when they do end it would be to herald the winter storms.


End file.
